The Hidden Terror of HR4437: What We Must
Learn Now from the Black Civil Rights Movement by Juan Santos
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 17, 2006

“I'm
not an American. I'm one of the twenty-two million Black people who are
the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million Black people who are the
victims of democracy -- nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I'm not
standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter,
or a flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American
system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any
American dream; I see an American nightmare.”

--
Malcolm X

They’re
lying to us.

They want us to keep
playing their way.

To keep waving
American flags.

To keep trusting
them to do the right thing.

We dare not.

Millions of people’s
lives are at stake.

Racist lawmakers on
the Republican ultra-Right now assure us -- after they were deeply stung
by the protests of millions, and after we won the hearts of 62% of the US
population -- that they want to drop the provisions in new immigration
laws that would make migrants felons.

?Y que?

Some three to six
million people would still be arrested and deported.

The Republicans and
Democrats alike have decided the arrests would be for misdemeanors -- not
felonies.

That’s so they don’t
clog their courts, a point that was made with crystalline clarity on the
House floor when HR4437 first passed in December. It has nothing to do
with “compassion” or authentic “inclusion.” They want us to imagine that
not being labeled “felons” will make us safe.

But nothing could be
further from the truth. Here’s why.

Every immigration
proposal still on the table authorizes local police to enforce federal
immigration law, just like agents of La Migra, the Border Patrol. The
National Immigration Law Center makes it plain:

State and local
police with no immigration law training could claim new authority as
enforcers of criminal law to decide when someone who "looks foreign" or
"sounds foreign" has violated federal criminal immigration law.

Everyone with brown
skin would become a stigmatized “suspect.” The only difference is we would
be suspects in a misdemeanor -- not a felony.

But the penalty for
the “crime” would remain the same -- for those without papers it means
deportation. FOX News tells us that under the Hagel -- Martinez
“Compromise” that was backed by the Democrats and by organizations like
the National Council of La Raza:

Illegals (sic) in the
United States less than two years would be required to leave
immediately. If caught once, they would be subject to a misdemeanor, and
if caught twice they would be charged with a felony. About 2 million to 3
million people fall into this category.

Under such
“compromises” millions of migrants will be deported, their families split
apart and uprooted. The “compromise” approach endangers not only migrants,
but all Brown people. It will open the door to a new ethnic cleansing, one
surpassing the ethnic cleansings of Mexicans the US government carried out
during the Great Depression, when 350,000 Mexicans and Chicanos were
deported, and during Operation Wetback, when 1,300,000 of us were deported
in the mid-1950s.

Imagine -- at a
minimum -- that everyone who’s marched for migrants rights in recent weeks
were deported. That will give you a picture of the magnitude of pain and
chaos the rulers want to inflict.

Not that life
post-“compromise” would necessarily give the impression that mass roundups
were underway. More likely, it would all happen quietly, millions
arrested, one by one: out of sight.

Call it a slow
death, the kind suffered today by impoverished African Americans in the
wake of the first Civil Rights Movement. It is imperative that our new
movement not suffer the same fate.

This is how it
worked then, and what they’re aiming for now.

When outrages like
open Jim Crow segregation could no longer be counted on to keep African
Americans “in their place” in the context of the world-wide anti-colonial
rebellions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the powers that be tried to buy off a
sector of Black people in the US by giving them new opportunities; a
substantial Black middle class arose almost overnight.

This is the
equivalent of the “carrot” of “legalization” and “citizenship” in our
context today.

For the rest of the
Black nation, stranded in the ghettos, Jim Crow was followed by an even
harsher master -- mass incarceration. One by one young African Americans
have vanished, locked into prison, until the ones added up to millions,
each rendered silent -- until the silence of the terror and rage in the
ghettos of America has grown so loud it has turned the nation deaf.

A similar fate would
await the millions, who, under a “compromise,” would face nothing less
than mass deportation, mass, legal persecution.

Same trick:
different decade.

A sister disappears;
a father, a mother...

Here’s the rough
numbers.

If every one of the
650,000 cops in the US were authorized to arrest only one migrant once
every three months, within two years 3 million of the migrants left
without papers would be gone. In four years half the migrant population of
the US would be gone. No mass roundups, no mobilization of the SS or the
National Guard. Just quietly, one by one, until the ones add up to
millions, and until the millions add up to silence.

And in that silence,
the terror and rage that has engulfed the ghetto would engulf the barrio
as well. Then, in a replay of the African American experience following
the Civil Rights Movement, our middle class “leaders” will wonder aloud
where the “victory” went, never admitting that their “compromise” was not
our victory, but our defeat. Never admitting they had helped to seal the
fate of millions, and helped advance the surge toward a fascist state in
the US.

Don’t imagine that
the powers that be don’t understand what they are doing. Even the
Minutemen understand it, as evidenced from this all-in–caps-communication
from one of their number…

TAKE AWAY WHAT THE
ENEMY HAS IT'S (SIC) EYES ON

... AND MAKE HIM
CHOOSE FROM THE ALTENATIVES (SIC) WE DECIDE TO OFFER... CONTROL THE
OPTIONS

…2.) USE THE RULE OF
LAW TO "FEIGN RETREAT"... IN OTHER WORDS ...PRETEND TO SACRIFICE THE
FELONY ISSUE, BUT STILL MAKE IT SO!

WHAT DO I MEAN?

THE BOTTOM LINE IS:
WE WANT THESE PEOPLE.... WHO ARE STOPPED BY POLICE TO BE DEPORTED RIGHT?

WELL.... THE RULE
LAW (sic), RIGHT NOW, IS THIS: ANY ILLEGALS CAUGHT ON THE BORDER IS
(sic).... DETAINED AND DEPORTED!

KEEPING IT A CIVIL
OFFENSE, MISDERMEANOR (sic)... AND SIMPLY APPLYING THE RULE OF LAW AT THE
BORDER TO REFLECT INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT WITH LOCAL POLICE IS MUCH MORE WHAT
WE WANT!

ALL WE NEED TO DO,
AS I HAVE SAYING (sic) IS... REFORM ENFORCEMENT!

…TIGHTENING THE
NOOSE, SCORCHING THE EARTH... WILL FORCE THE ENEMY TO LEAVE, VOLUNTARILY!

15 MILLION ILLEGALS,
DEPORTED COMES OUT TO BE LIKE 8 THOUSAND ILLEGALS EVERY DAY NONSTOP FOR 5
YEARS!

THE NAZIS, WHO DID
NOT NEED DUE PROCESS... TOOK ALMOST 10 YEARS TO ROUND UP LESS THAN THAT...
PRIOR TO THE FINAL SOLUTION...

However poorly
articulated, this Minuteman understands the situation clearly. The powers
that be are parading an illusion of “due process” before us, and trying to
appear as something less than punitive, while they set the stage for a
radical ethnic cleansing, American style.

To achieve this,
they are using the time tested method of divide and conquer, the same
tricks they used to derail the first civil rights movement, and to destroy
the lives of millions of African Americans, while keeping their system
safe from any rebellion from below by establishing a Black buffer caste
who, they hoped, would come to have an investment in being real
“Americans.”

That’s the same bait
they hope today’s movement will take. But we must understand that what’s
gotten us this far is our will to resist. It is our will to resist that
spoke most plainly to our would-be persecutors, not flags, not even our
dreams. The government that trained and financed the death squads of
Guatemala, El Salvador, and, yes, Mexico, cares nothing for our dreams.

We must stand united
-- un pueblo unido -- holding close the bravery and audacity that
has caused our movement to sweep the nation and the world into
wakefulness.

The answer to this
dilemma -- to the trap they have laid for us -- is clear and simple.

No compromise.

No trading the life
of one for the life of another.

And as of May 1st,
the day of the general strike…

No more American
flags.

Juan Santos
is editor of Mexica Tlahtolli, a Chicano/Native American newspaper
in Los Angeles. He can be reached at:JuanSantos@Mexica.net.